As promised my review went from a negative to a more than recommended due to the devs quick response and addition of accessibility settings. You can now remove blur and most importantly, headbob, two effects that can cause extreme pain in those who suffer from motion sickness but want to play the game.
The game looks absolutely amazing, eerie, and has no entities, emojis or "trendy" writing on walls. It trusts silence and it trusts it's own ability to be creepy without forcing it, which is far harder to do than most people think.
One thing I have to admit is that the low number of levels is a detriment to such an amazing game and would absolutely love the devs to create at least one more level, and if all, something unseen from the Backrooms, like Level 7, thallassophobia, since, until now, I only saw one game using it, which is The Backrooms: Lost Tape.
Level 7 has to be one of the creepiest things in gaming history and it rarely has been used, so, here's the idea.
Play the game, if you enjoy games like POOLS, Dreamcore and those who trust environmental history iver constant stick man running after you.
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[Original Review]
I have now played 90 games with the Backrooms / Liminal Spaces theme. Some I absolutely recommend, such as POOLS, Disminal, Liminal Shift, LIMINALCORE, Dreamcore (much to my chagrin), and Transliminal. Those games are the epitome of this genre done right. The rest, unfortunately, as painful as it is for me to admit, are just... the rest.
Most cannot escape the copy-paste feel, right down to sharing the same flaws: endless entities, emojis (emojis... in a horror game!), silly writing on walls like PAIN, SUFFERING, DEATH, DARKNESS, DESPAIR... as if an emo kid from the 2000s wandered in and never left. Then come the filters. Lots of filters. VHS filters, blurry VHS filters, blur, more blur, and a wide array of visual effects meant to create an "oh so realistic" experience.
We are, of course, playing a game set in a parallel universe while carrying a flashlight with infinite batteries, so I believe realism left the building quite some time ago.
And then we arrive at the bane of nearly every game in the genre: barebones graphical options and headbob up the wazoo. Nothing wrong with that if you enjoy playing like a drunken sailor. Good for you. But if you suffer from motion sickness, avoid most Backrooms games like the plague, because 90% of these developers seem convinced that "their vision" should simply copy someone else's vision.
After playing nearly 100 of these games, I'm beginning to suspect that adding an on/off toggle for headbob and filters is comparable in difficulty to creating an open-world game populated by NPCs with their own routines, schedules, and ambitions.
All of this brings us to this game, which must be Backrooms game number 91 on my list.
No, I cannot recommend it.
Spend your money elsewhere because, despite looking fantastic (which I'm increasingly convinced is largely due to the use of high-quality assets, hence the lack of options), there is nothing here that you haven't already seen or played before.
To the game's credit, it avoids many of the genre's worst habits. There are no emojis, no endless entities, no edgy wall writing, and no desperate attempts to explain everything through lore scribbled onto every available surface.
However, the lack of filter options and, most importantly, the inability to disable headbob make it a non-recommendation for me. The option, and I repeat option, to turn them off completely, not to lower it, not to make it less noticeable but to remove it. Unfortunately as I came to understand most of the time, the headbob is connected to the way the camera was programmed so I fear this will not happen.
If those options are added in the future, I will happily change this review to something far more positive, because what is here is genuinely quite good.
